Posted in: Comics, Current News | Tagged: comicspro, mcm

What If MCM London Comic Con Hosted A ComicsPRO Event But No One Came?

What If... MCM London Comic Con hosted a ComicsPRO event but no one came? Let's rewind back to last Friday...

On Friday, the MCM London Comic Con hosted a ComicsPRO event, the first such in the UK. ComicsPRO is a retailer activist organisation that took over running the annual retailer summits in the US from Diamond Comic Distribution. And two of its members, ComicsPro Board Member & Director of Education Shannon Live and her husband and co-owner of Bat City Comics of Florida, Matt Live had been flown over to make a presentation to British comic book retailers, and a hundred MCM passes and invites had been given to British comic book retailers to attend. A few floors above the rest of the MCM held at the ExCel Centre in London's Docklands area, Shannon Live began to talk to the assembled crowd about the start of events for kids in comic book stores. She emphasised that retailers often give up after one or two events, after only one or two children attend, but she emphasised not giving up. But keep going, getting a reputation for that kind of event and seeing the numbers grow with persistence.

This is probably also a lesson for ComicsPRO in the UK, as there were about nine people in the audience. Two were reporters (me and Dean Simons from Publishers' Weekly), four were with manga publishers Kodansha, one was from PR and two were retailers. Oh, and Dave Elliott, who had been planning to launch the news that he was bringing back Deadline Magazine and A1 in one new volume, to a big audience, and talk up his work with Ridley Scott. By the time it came to his presentation at the end, it was just Shannon and me left. So he did it anyway, I filmed it, and it was broadcast to thousands. Turns out the hundred retailers who had been given a free ticket to the show had decided it was better to just go to the showfloor, buy comics, get them signed, meet the creators and do deals amongst themselves in the Bridge bar or outside the Fox pub..

I talked to some folks from Diamond UK, who usually do this kind of retailer event at MCM and have done something similar at Thought Bubble. Last year, they had DC Comics attend, did a presentation revealing all manner of upcoming plans and then had Jeph Loeb announce Batman: The Last Halloween. Diamond UK also had an issue with getting folks from the showroom up the stairs to the Platinum Suite, with around fifty making it last year. But they'd never had only one retailer who wasn't on a presentation panel in their audience  – and who left halfway through. They asked what incentives ComicsPRO had handed out.

The answer was none. Because the cold, hard truth is that retailers need to be bribed to attend presentations on their industry. ComicsPRO in the US knows this, with bags of event-exclusive items for attending retailers. However, there was nothing for the UK version, aside from some Modville previews, such as Bill Sienkiewicz posters Dave Elliott had brought along; he later made a deal with Diamond UK folk at MCM to get them to UK retailers. Anna Morrow, Director of Marketing at DC Comics, was at MCM this year, putting on the Kids Treehouse section of MCM She just never made it up to ComicsPRO and in retrospect, that was probably a good thing.

It was a shame for many reasons, but Shannon Live did her presentation anyway, with Matt Live joining in, and a discussion panel to follow, with as much energy and enthusiasm as if there was a room full of British retailers. I'd met them in a Soho pub the previous night, attended by comic book creators from the UK and the US, and really liked them. And this followed through, the paucity of attendance did not put either off their stride, and they walked through some of the tricks that comic book stores can do in order to grow their market and become more of a part of their community. Some I had heard, a lot I hadn't, and it was an utterly fascinating look at the challenges of a modern comic book store from the coal face. I just wish there had been more people to hear it. Maybe next year?

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